Bank of Japan policymakers said during a Policy Board meeting in September that the U.S. subprime mortgage collapse was caused by keeping interest rates too low, signaling their intention to increase the world's lowest borrowing costs to prevent investment bubbles.
Some of the nine board members said a "long period" of global monetary easing had led to "excessive financial behavior" that resulted in the U.S. home-loan crisis, according to minutes of their Sept. 18-19 meeting released Monday.
The BOJ is concerned that keeping its benchmark interest rate at 0.5 percent risks seeding future asset bubbles.